Hygge lives on at the Minnesota Orchestra.
Visitors stepping into Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis on a recent, frigid Saturday were greeted with a roaring fireplace and Scandi furniture strewed with blankets. Snacks were on sale from Ingebretsen’s, a local purveyor of Nordic goods, and pastries from the nearby Krown Bakery. In the lobby, the singer Taylor Ann Grand gave a brief introduction to Danish folk tunes; upstairs, the Icelandic Hekla Club explained different varieties of wool, and the Danish American Center handed out traditional paper crafts to take home.
The occasion was the Minnesota Orchestra’s first Nordic Soundscapes Festival. The inspiration was Thomas Sondergard, the Danish conductor in his second season as music director.
Scandinavian themes are nothing new in Minneapolis, which was partly built on immigration from that region, or at this ensemble. Its audiences were known to fly Finnish flags in honor of Osmo Vänskä, who raised the orchestra to rare heights of excellence in a turbulent 19-year tenure as music director that ended in 2022. But Sondergard, 55, is slowly making his influence felt on everything from what the orchestra plays to the interior design of its spaces.
The festival’s repertoire was notably broad: Loosely centered on the Danish composer Carl Nielsen, it made room for overlooked composers as well as important contemporary scores. The first orchestral program of the two weeks started with an energetic overture by Elfrida Andrée, a pioneering Swedish composer, organist and conductor; took in new works like Bent Sorensen’s atmospheric “Evening Land” and Outi Tarkiainen’s “Midnight Sun Variations,” a remarkable reflection on light; and ended with a strikingly comforting rendition of Sibelius’s “Finlandia.”
It wasn’t the kind of concert you would have associated with Sondergard’s predecessor, whose final season included a festival focused on Sibelius alone. But one thing was certain: Under its new leader the Minnesota Orchestra still has the pride and quality that Vänskä helped instill, playing with a conviction and an intensity that could put many a more heralded ensemble to shame.
SONDERGARD WAS BORN in Holstebro, a small town in northwest Denmark. An artistically inclined child, he watched concerts on television more intently than shows intended for boys his age; his mother sang him bits of Nielsen. He became a timpanist and, in 1992, joined the Royal Danish Orchestra. He also spent several years in what was then called the European Community Youth Orchestra, watching conductors like Claudio Abbado and Bernard Haitink as they worked.
“I would not get the timpani players around the world on my neck by saying that we have a little bit more time than string players to observe,” Sondergard said in an interview in his office, remembering those rehearsals. “If our score is three pages, theirs is 30, at least. So, there is a little bit more time to sit, and I started, little by little, to get a sincere interest in digging deeper into the music.”
Still playing in the Danish orchestra, Sondergard conducted contemporary music concerts and some of the smaller Danish ensembles before the Royal Danish Opera asked him to assist in rehearsals for the premiere of Poul Ruders’s “Kafka’s Trial” in 2005. He ended up taking charge of the performances, conducting his own colleagues, and his podium career took off. Positions at the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra — where he has served as the music director since 2018 — swiftly followed.
Sondergard knew of the Minnesota Orchestra from recordings before he made his debut in December 2021, he said, but during his initial concerts he still felt like he was finding hidden treasure. In the first one, an exhilarating account of Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben,” there are moments when Sondergard looks like he can barely believe what he is hearing.
“I was blown off that podium by the sheer energy, interest, connection,” he recalled.
Sondergard’s inclusive and gesturally elegant approach was exactly what the musicians were looking for. “He’s got this collaborative way about him,” noted the longtime principal trombonist Douglas Wright. “He meets the orchestra wherever the orchestra is and then adds his bit to it.”
Sondergard returned for a short concert in April 2022, then, that July, signed a five-year deal that will bring him to Minneapolis for 12 weeks a year.
Since then, he has shown a flair for programming, pairing Ravel with Adès in a series of concerts, and celebrating Pride with Ethel Smyth, Poulenc and Tchaikovsky in another. (He married the baritone Andreas Landin just before his appointment in Minnesota was announced.) In May, he will lead Puccini’s “Turandot” in the first of what he hopes will be a regular opera series, and he expects that the Nordic festival will return. He has thrown himself into community engagement, too, insisting on leading family concerts himself. He was on the podium when area music teachers played with the orchestra in May — a time when the Minneapolis School District was threatening to cut fifth-grade instrumental classes.
Sondergard recently moved to Malmo, Sweden, but if there were concerns that he might struggle to forge ties in Minnesota, his willingness to get involved and his tendency to talk personably from the stage have built the necessary connections, musicians and staff said. He has even struck up a friendship, rare among leading conductors, with Vänskä, a regular Orchestra Hall visitor who still lives in the area with his wife, the concertmaster Erin Keefe. Sondergard said he and Vänskä had been hanging out, though they are yet to start comparing notes on scores.
Sondergard is “a wonderful colleague, as well as a leader and music director,” said Emily Switzer, a second violinist and the current chair of the musicians’ committee. “The way he runs rehearsals, and envisions the sound of the orchestra, it’s very inviting. You want to do well, you want to bring your best work to the stage, always.”
“We’re still on our honeymoon,” Wright said, beaming.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE to Minnesotans is still what matters most to this orchestra, the rare ensemble that means what it says when it comes to racial justice and other social topics.
“We’ve decided that what really matters is service to the community,” said Brent Assink, a veteran arts executive who is holding the fort as interim president and chief executive. “It sounds corny, but it’s really, really true.”
It’s a belief that has guided the orchestra since the end of the darkest period in its history, when management locked out the players for more than a season, starting in October 2012. It is a different ensemble now, 39 percent of its roster having been hired since 2014, but musicians remain at the core of operations to an unusual degree for an American orchestra. In this “Minnesota model,” as the organization calls it, musicians sit on committees with board members and staff to take important decisions. Communication is important, as is a shared understanding of what makes a great symphony orchestra great.
“It’s an orchestra that’s got impact in its community,” Wright said. “It also has impact nationally and internationally, because all of those things bring pride and joy back to the home community.” He added, “As long as we all have that definition and that goal in mind, I think we can do great things.”
Funding an ensemble of this standard remains a challenge. Attendance reached an admirable 83 percent of total capacity in 2023-24, and in 2022-23, the most recent year for which results are public, the orchestra recorded a surplus of $1.1 million on a $42.4 million budget, its first year in the black since 2018. It intends to add earned revenue to its bottom line through a partnership with the Community Performing Arts Center, a new outdoor amphitheater in the city.
Even so, the orchestra faces the same financial headwinds as ensembles across the country. Pandemic-era government funding has now ceased. (That $1.1 million surplus was partly made possible by $4.5 million in forgiven Paycheck Protection Program loans.) General foundation support can no longer be counted on. Corporate philanthropy, too, has diminished, which is a particular problem in a city where business leaders once took pride in making generous contributions to the arts.
“The things that made the Minnesota Orchestra thrive and grow, a couple of them have now been knocked away from us,” Assink said. “It just requires great creativity and ownership by the broader community to say: ‘OK, this is what we have. We have an orchestra that is exceptionally strong artistically. What are we going to do to hang on to that?’”
SPEND JUST A few minutes in and around Orchestra Hall, and you can sense the affection and respect people here still feel for this ensemble. Nordic sweaters were everywhere over the first festival weekend, as patrons got into the spirit of things. Soloists drawn from the orchestra were hailed like heroes, the principal clarinet Gabriel Campos Zamora for his perfectly characterized account of Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto, the principal cellist Anthony Ross for his pained eloquence in Daniel Bjarnason’s hushed “Bow to String.”
Most impressive of all is the intensity with which audiences here listen. During a Sunday chamber concert, in which 17 members of the orchestra teamed up to play works by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Anders Hillborg, among others, it genuinely felt as if performers and listeners were engaged in a single, collective musical endeavor. Sondergard looked on from the balcony, with Vänskä a few seats down.
“There’s an honesty in the music making and an interest in serving the community,” Sondergard said of the orchestra. Now he wants to spread the word.
